Marc Roper - Overview of Current Projects

The evaluation and development of inspection-based defect detection technologies
for OO software. (In conjunction with Murray Wood and Alastair Dunsmore)
This work grew out of previous interests in the development
and evaluation of testing techniques, and a critical examination of the
impact of OO technologies on maintenance. Inspection techniques are widely
used and effective approaches to defect detection but very few people have
considered their application to OO systems. It appears that radically different
approach to code inspection is required and a number of proposed techniques
are being developed and evaluated.
Slides from our ICSE2002 presentation on this work.

The construction, verification and understanding of large OO architectures
and frameworks. (In conjunction with Murray Wood and Doug Kirk)

This work is currently concentrated on the area of frameworks - in particular the problem of how developers
can quickly come to grips with such large pieces of software so as to be
able to sensibly develop and deploy framework-based systems. This project
is raising a number of related-issues, such as pattern-based documentation,
reverse-engineering problems and a raft of testing and maintenance problems.
This work is funded by the EPSRC -
see
Documenting Object-Oriented Frameworks: An Empirical Investigation for
more details.

The application of metaheuristic techniques to software engineering
problems.

This grew out of the challenge of developing test data generation tools.
One of the approaches made use of genetic algorithms to automatically grow
data to follow particular paths through a program. A number of other researchers
in the UK were developing similar approaches and this grew into the EPSRC
funded SEMINAL network which has widened the net to look at how a range
of software engineering problems can be tackled by soft computing approaches.

Evaluation of testing technologies.

Despite the proliferation of testing techniques there exists a fundamental
weakness - trying to establish how effective the application of a technique
has been. For example, what percentage defects is the technique likely to
find, what are the characteristics of these defects etc. etc. Some empirical
work in this area is being carried out in conjunction with
CERN .